Holocaust survivors honor man who saved them

World at a glance

September 5, 2009

BRITAIN

Nicholas Winton, 100, talks with Tal Cohain on Friday at Liverpool Street station in London, where Winton was reunited with about two dozen people, including Tal's grandmother Hannah Slome, that he rescued from Czechoslovakia before the Nazis invaded. "For me he is like a father," said Joseph Ginat, 80, who was 10 when he traveled to England in August 1939 as part of the "kindertransports." "He gave us life," Ginat said.

AFGHANISTAN

8 embassy guards fired

KABUL - Eight security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan were fired and two resigned after allegations of lewd behavior and sexual misconduct at their living quarters. The Kabul senior management team of ArmorGroup North America, the private contractor that provides guards for the State Department, was also "being replaced immediately," an embassy statement said Friday. The terminated guards, who left Afghanistan on Friday, all appeared in photographs depicting guards and supervisors in various stages of nudity at parties flowing with alcohol, the embassy said. Their names and nationalities were not released.

CALIFORNIA

Wildfire dying down

LOS ANGELES - Fire bosses declared progress early Friday in taming the 232-square-mile arson fire north of Los Angeles that has led to a homicide investigation into the deaths of two firefighters.

Flames had died down early Friday and the blaze, 42 percent surrounded, was "pretty quiet," U.S. Forest Service spokesman John Huschke said. The fire has destroyed 64 homes and burned three people.

Investigators determined the 11-dayold blaze was arson, and Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide detectives were investigating.

Two firefighters were killed Sunday when their truck plunged 800 feet down a steep mountain road.

KENTUCKY

Sentence in '06 Iraq rape

PADUCAH - A former soldier received five consecutive life sentences Friday in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of three of her family members.

"What the defendant did was horrifying and inexcusable," U.S. District Judge Thomas Russell said in sentencing to Steven Dale Green, 24, of Midland, Texas. "The court believes any lesser sentence would be insufficient."

A civilian jury in western Kentucky convicted Green in May of raping Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, conspiracy and multiple counts of murder.

Green shot and killed the teen's mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape her before shooting her in the face.

Her body was set on fire March 12, 2006, at their rural home outside Mahmoudiya, Iraq.

WASHINGTON

Group tips radio towers

SEATTLE - Two radio station towers near Seattle that have generated intense local opposition were toppled early Friday in an act of sabotage that bore the initials of the radical Earth Liberation Front.

The towers for KRKO-AM - one of which was 349 feet tall - were torn down because of health and environmental concerns, according to an e-mail from the North American ELF Press Office, which has represented the shadowy group in the past.

"We have to weigh our priorities, and the local ecosystem in Everett, along with the local residents, do not need additional sports news radio station towers," ELF press office spokesman Jason Crawford said in the e-mail.

The ELF is a loose collection of radical environmentalists that has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks since the 1990s. The FBI has taken over as lead investigator in Friday's incident.

GEORGIA

Relative arrested in killings

BRUNSWICK - Police have arrested a family member who called 911 on eight counts of first-degree murder in the slayings of people found in a Georgia mobile home.

Guy Heinze Jr., 22, was arrested Friday on charges that he killed the people whose bodies were found last weekend near the coastal community of Brunswick. Among those killed were seven of Heinze's relatives. In a frantic 911 call early last Saturday, Heinze had told a dispatcher "My whole family's dead!"

Hours after the bodies were found, Heinze was charged with evidence tampering and drug possession. He had been briefly released on bond related to the lesser charges and arrested again later Friday.